


Watch

by bluemoonwings



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 06:11:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4908367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoonwings/pseuds/bluemoonwings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A "missing" scene from my parent work "Beasts and Beauties: A Love Story from Paternoster Row" that I turned into its own short story. :-)</p><p>Jenny combines raw talent and hidden intelligence to impress Madame Vastra.  Set around the end of the chapter "Apprentice" You don't have to read the larger work to read this one, but it helps.</p><p>Rated T only because it ties in with a VERY adult story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watch

**Author's Note:**

> For IrisSteth who gave me great feedback, encouraged me, and inspired me to develop this idea. You wanted to see more of Jenny as a tinkerer? Here is my first offering, with foreshadows of a couple others.
> 
> Note on the title: It is not only noun. By the end, I suspect Vastra will employ the verb form much more carefully. ;-)

 

[Around the end of "Apprentice" in the very slightly AU parent work "Beauties and Beasts"]

 

 

Jenny Flint had probably bitten off more than she could chew. She wasn't about to tell Madame Vastra this piece of sensitive information, however, because she had staked an entire day off against extra chores (probably chopping wood until she was near death) and something like another six miles of running with a yoke and two buckets to make up for the training she was missing now. She sat on the table in the kitchen, which had been cleared entirely to allow her a clean work space, and upon an unrolled length of thin leather was a pocket watch. It wasn't any old pocket watch though. It was a Silurian astrolabe, to be exact, so not only did it tell time, but it told the time on _other_ planets in _other galaxies_ , simultaneously. Or at least it had, until Vastra had had to make an emergency jump into the Thames from a moving boat, the concussive force of her fall, paired with God-knew-what was in that water, rendering the timepiece, and all of its navigation capacities, useless.

Vastra had left the previous morning and returned the following night. While Jenny rarely worried about her employer-turned-instructor, she had been antsy when a quick pursuit of a Russian weapons dealer had gone on a full twelve hours longer than anticipated. She had been reading a frustrating book—in Silurian-- using a dictionary program that she, quite frankly, hated, and was trying out some Silurian curses she had learned just from being around Vastra during particularly upsetting casework, when her mistress unexpectedly returned, shouting in her mind, and, probably having momentarily forgotten that her apprentice was now “barely psychic”, accidentally taught her a new one.

The smell reached Jenny in the study before Vastra actually entered, sodden and dripping every kind of imaginable filth onto the floor. Her hat and veil were gone and the skirt of her dress had been torn away almost completely. Her eyes were dark and dangerous but softened just a bit as she beheld Jenny sitting there.

“What the Devil happened to you?” Jenny wondered, jumping up at once.

“Bad intelligence,” Vastra hissed, slamming a pair of long knives down on the table. “Or should I simply say 'simian intelligence' as it appears to amount to exactly the same thing!” She huffed as Jenny automatically moved behind her and helped her unbutton and unlace her dress, which had formed a foul puddle beneath her.

“What happened?” Jenny pressed, as finally the garment slid down to reveal Vastra in dark under things. She looked away quickly.

“They were expecting me. Waiting for me in fact! I took a bullet and I think I might be deaf in my right ear!” Vastra snarled, and before Jenny could stop her, hurled the remains of her ruined garment into the fire, which roared and spat and immediately stank. Jenny was surprised that it didn't go out, what with how wet the whole thing was. She turned her attention instead to Vastra's face, which she could now see bore a deep scratch across the cheek, over the slit of her ear, and ended with a small chunk taken out of one of her scalp ridges.

“Oh my God, Ma'am, is that what that is?” Jenny pressed her hands to her mouth in horror. “I'll go get the med kit.”

“Don't bother, I'm fine, as long as my hearing returns to normal. It just grazed me, but at such close range, it could have ruptured the eardrum. Won't that be something to complain about to Her Majesty!” Vastra didn't even give Jenny a second glance as she began to stride from the room, presumably for the sonic showering system in the powder room. A loud thunk noise was heard and they both looked down.

On the floor was what looked to be a pocket watch in a faintly pinkish golden color, but with a complicated and intricate face that both looked mechanical and pictoral. Vastra snatched it up before she could really look at it. “No, no, no. Ugh, it's worthless now,” she growled with frustration, “It would figure. Irreplaceable too unless the Doctor shows up sometime.”

Jenny bit her lip. “What is it?”

Vastra stared at her. “Don't you know a pocket watch when you see one?”

The snipe would have hurt Jenny more than a little, but she decided that Vastra was due for some form of venting. “I have, but not like that.”

“It's archaic, as all pocket watches are that you humans use,” Vastra explained with great annoyance, at Jenny or other humans, she couldn't quite tell. “This one, however, was made by my grandsire, and rehoused as a pocket watch by another Silurian the Doctor met on his travels across the stars. 'Tis an astrolabe, you see, and can tell you the positions of all the major navigating stars and other celestial objects of interest as well as the time, based on these calculations. In fact, you could align it on any planet and it would still operate. This little thing, is not unlike what makes the TARDIS navigate to the right, or should I say, wrong places?” She held it up and shook it in Jenny's face before making a move to pitch it into the fire as well.

“Whoa wait!” Jenny yelped, snatching it from her hand. “Can't it be fixed? I mean if it was your gramp's isn't it important?”

Vastra sniffed. “It was little more than a prop before my little dip in that sewer you call a river, and unfortunately, I sincerely doubt it. Machines of any sort are really not my specialty, you see, and it is unlikely that one of your watch makers would know how to make heads or tails of it, even if I could show them the Nagaron crystal inside without causing mass panic.”

“Naga-what?”

The Silurian sighed and shifted her weight impatiently from one leg to another. “A power source, mined deeper in the Earth than humans have ever gone. It perpetually resets the clock in motion so that it should run forever, or very nearly so. Too bad it's obviously shattered now. It's a lost cause. Get it out of my sight so I don't have to relive the indignity of this moment anymore.”

“My grandfather was a watchmaker as a young man,” Jenny replied, absently stroking the now open face of the clock. “I used to watch him when I was a little girl. Maybe I could take a look at it?”

“Looking is about all you'll do. It's beyond help, especially a...watchmaker by proxy, if I may be so generous,” Vastra grumbled.

This time, Jenny found herself rise in challenge at Vastra's little slight. “You think Silurians are so different from us, but a watch is a watch, whether it has a Necktie crystal--”

“Nagaron.”

“Nagaron, or spring and winder, is still a mechanical device with moving parts, all cause-and-effect-like, isn't it?” Jenny raised her eyebrows and gestured. “Is it or not?”

Vastra took a second and considered this. “It is,” she conceded slowly, “but that doesn't mean it won't still be too complex to fix. Those pieces are minute, Jenny, and the shattered crystal will have chipped up every component it its final oscillations.” Jenny must have looked crestfallen because Vastra sighed through her nose and folded her hand around the device. “Take a day off and see what you can do about it then, if you're so keen on timepieces. If you fix it, I'll give you a day's vacation. What do you think?”

Well that sounded good but there was always a catch. “What if I can't?” Jenny asked suspiciously.

“Well then, you'll do double the work for wasting time on such frivolous and fruitless pursuits when you're supposed to be training.” Vastra decided, a true draconian overlord as always, “So get to it then... but um... after you finish the floor.” They had reached the back powder room and Vastra stepped within, “Your time starts at sunrise tomorrow. I would rather be done with this debacle sooner rather than later. I'll be out so you'll have all the quiet time you need. Good night, Jenny,” she announced, without giving Jenny room to say anything, and shut the door in her face just like that.

 

Taking a devil's bet like that had not been wise, but Jenny wasn't by any means stupid. She had rushed to mop and polish the floor and clean up whatever Vastra had later left in the shower room for her to dispose of, and then she had run straight upstairs and turned on the computer and began researching the database for designs and components of both clocks and Silurian astrolabes. It wasn't cheating, she reasoned, for Vastra had not laid down any terms for repair. She was simply to repair it, and that would be endgame.

She needed tools. She had brought nothing with her but the clothes on her back and a book of matches when she had entered the employ of the Veiled Detective, but with her modest salary over the course of the last few months, had managed to collect a few things of use. Now that she was dining with her master all the time, she had seen an increase in savings that she was no longer spending on food, and reasoned that whatever she might need, she could surely procure.

Before her now, aside from a broken watch she had found a month earlier, and Vastra's watch, was a lock picking kit, slightly incomplete, that she had lifted off a drunken smith during one of her outings, a few screwdrivers of all different sizes ranging from tiny (one), medium (several), and large (one, but one too many, as it was more like to be useful as a crowbar than a screwdriver). When a bit earlier, Vastra had headed out the door, in much higher spirits than the previous night, and her hearing evidently restored, she had peeked in to check on her. Finding the girl struggling to disassemble the human watch, she had remarked that it was a shame to have so many screwdrivers and none of them “sonic” for that was probably the best way to get it fixed in a hurry other than waking up some angry Silurians. Jenny had simply bitten her tongue and replied evenly that it would be done easier if she wasn't distracted, and clucking her tongue, Vastra had gone away.

There were secrets about her life before Paternoster Row that Jenny had never told her employer and that Vastra had either not deduced or did not care about. It was a matter of personal pride to Jenny that while she not give away every detail at once, she perform well, and earn respect. Normal respect wasn't enough. She hated when Vastra looked at her as if she were some kind of pet, and not even an exotic kind, but rather more like a stray dog or a mouse. Events had shown a certain amount of kindness and, sure, respect, from her reptilian mistress, but it wasn't enough for Jenny. _I'll show her I'm just as good as she is,_ she thought to herself, and set to work.

First, the back of the human watch had to come off. It was dented on one side where the halves of the casing fit together. She wedged a medium sized screwdriver between the two components, and tapped it with the largest screwdriver firmly but gently. “Please don't fly apart,” she grunted at it, “I need to see what you look like inside.” At last, the casing gave, and she carefully opened it with see-sawing motions of the screwdriver. This part was familiar. A winding mechanism that went into the watch and cranked a circular spring that would slowly unwind, barrels to transfer energy into cog wheels, which in turn would be slowed to a regular pace by a counterbalancing mechanism that, with the help of plates and teeth, would basically clip and release the gears every second with each full oscillation. Jenny knew from observation that in a larger clock, a pendulum would be used instead of a winding key. In the case of this watch, the winder had broken against the first spring. Both were dented.

Confident that she at least knew what kind of things she was looking for, she turned her attention to Vastra's device. The casing was not the same despite the similar shape. It came apart in three or four pieces (if one counted the ornate top), and what greeted her when she finally got the top and bottom layers off, was something she had never imagined. There were more gears in here than four pocket watches, in layers of five or so. If she didn't reassemble this perfectly after taking it apart, she would never get it back together. Jenny ran into the her room and pulled out a few sheets of scratch paper and a charcoal stylus. Then she grabbed the computer as well and brought it down to the table with her. “Show me a Silurian astrolabe, exploded view,” she told it, and wondered not for the first time why such strange words were used to explain such simple diagrams. Exploded view? Wouldn't that be in tiny broken pieces and not a small amount of fire? It was so strange to Jenny, but she let her mind move away from that as she sketched her observations, referring every once in awhile to the objects before her and the computer.

The database showed her a more complex version, like what would be used in a space ship, and the most simple version she could coax out of the computer was not small like hers but large enough to mount on a ship or something. It wasn't perfect but with some study, she figured out some of it. It was not unlike a watch in movement alone, except a hundred times more complicated. She decided to tackle that later though, because first she needed to figure out that naga...nagaron crystal. There were fragments everywhere, red in color, and sharp as glass. She cursed as her finger caught one.

After hunting through her toiletries she found a pair of tweezers and with the help of a magnifying glass that she mounted above the astrolabe on a metal rack, she was able to extract every shard, even those that had been reduced to nearly needle-fine particles. If it had been the power source, she reasoned that there must have been something that would get the gears to move. Where was it? She couldn't see it.

“How goes it?” She looked up. It was Vastra, poking her head into the kitchen with an intrigued expression.

Jenny's eyes went wide. “What time is it?” She left what she was doing and came around to take Vastra's hat and veil from her.

“It's four o'clock. I can handle this, dear, thank you. You're going to work twice as hard tomorrow anyway,” she chuckled, but came around to see what she was doing. “I'm impressed. You look like you have a headache though. Is this glass powerful enough?”

Jenny shook her head, and only then realized she had been squinting for some time. “I'm trying to find the thing that makes...” she gestured at a tiny piece that had led from the power source, “this move. In a watch it looks like so,” she made a V with her fingers and indicated a squared bottom, “and it...vibrates, apparently.”

“Like a tuning fork.”

Jenny's eyes went wide. “Yes! That's exactly it. It's too small for me to really see what I'm looking at though.”

“Wait here.” Vastra left Jenny, who began to brew some tea, and returned, sans veil, with a pair of spectacles. The problem was, however, they were not spectacles that Jenny had ever seen, for they featured no less than four lenses on pivoting arms attached to tiny gears. Vastra put them on Jenny's face like a pair of very wide glasses. “These are mostly to protect your eyes,” she explained, “but these...” She pivoted one lens down before her right eye, and Jenny was amazed at the magnification. Vastra moved another, which slid down in front of it, and Jenny grew instantly dizzy at her greatly improved vision. It was too strong. Had she not also been looking through her left eye, which was normal, she would have been unable to focus at all.

“Curious spectacles,” she whispered, folding the lenses up to look at Vastra. She thought she must have just discovered how eagles feel while flying and looking for field mice.

“Hmm. I found them in a shop awhile back and found the design intriguing, if cumbersome,” Vastra replied casually, almost bored, “The lenses were terrible. I swapped them for refined convexed crystal. They should be adequately durable but do be careful as they are hard to obtain on short order.”

Jenny hadn't even caught up with her yet. She was too busy experimenting with the pivots. They were aligned just perfectly and didn't move any lower than a tooth at the edge of the pivoting gear allowed, so there was no risk of the spectacles slipping while working. She didn't find the design cumbersome at all. In fact, she found it quite elegant and simple, but with maximum effectiveness. The lightness of the crystal lenses was undoubtedly a huge improvement as well, for they were very light and clear.

Vastra watched Jenny's mind wander away from her, and smiled in spite of herself. The girl had a keen mind, despite her class, and now she was beginning to show her potential. She glanced over to where a pot of tea had been put on. She was not only a smart ape, but a thoughtful one. She watched Jenny adjust the spectacles and set to work with tweezers and a small instrument that she pulled from a small roll of fabric, which Vastra had not examined but was reasonably sure was at least part of a lock-picking kit.

“Without a power source, it will never move, and it is unstable with the damaged housing,” Jenny grumbled, “but I do see the tuning fork. Actually several. They're stacked upon one another, all different densities by the look of them. This is like ten clocks all mashed into one, but the main one is here, and it won't move without the power source.”

She would not admit that she was disappointed to see Jenny fail, so Vastra quietly took the kettle off and got the tea ready.

“Madam?” Jenny wasn't looking up.

“Yes, Jenny?”

“Can you go into the box under the table and pull out anything metal that you see, please?”

“Whatever for? And what is this box?” Vastra peered into it with great suspicion upon finding glass jars, old bits of wire, some wood, a rusty pocket knife, a metal tin, and several other odds and ends.

“I call it my junk box. I save things I find that might be useful,” Jenny replied above her on the table, her voice sounding far away and distracted.

“You have a... _junk box_...under the kitchen table?” Vastra was perplexed and slightly disturbed but she couldn't for the life of her say precisely why. Maybe the idea that something, anything, existed in her house that she wasn't aware of was unsettling, or maybe the idea that she had underestimated Jenny, not for the first time, concerned her.

“I need a soft mallet and that metal tin,” Jenny ordered, ignoring her while she began disassembling the human pocket watch.

Vastra blinked in surprise, about to protest, but instead handed her the tin and reported, “You only have a small regular hammer.” She held it up. It wasn't large, and the handle was splintered.

“Hmm...can you wrap it in that length of muslin?” Jenny asked. Vastra looked down and found it. It wasn't long, but she could double fold it, and then tie the end around the back of the instrument. Doubtingly, she handed it to Jenny, who took it without having to look, and began pounding a screwdriver into the top of the circular tin.

“What are you doing now?” Vastra wondered, sitting beside her and sipping her tea.

“The casing is damaged so I need to replace it. It's too big to fit in my watch back, so I'll make a new one. I'll have to carefully...” Her voice trailed off in thought as she carefully lifted the whole device up, sans back piece, and positioned it into the tin, fitting it almost perfectly, tapping on it around the edges with the hammer. Then, she fit a rod-like piece into the top of the tin, sliding it right onto the gears and retrofitted spring. With care, she took the face and began to fit the movement onto the mechanism.

 _This couldn't possibly work_. Vastra thought to herself, but then, there it was, in Jenny's hand, not her astrolabe, and certainly not a human pocket watch, but something kind of in the middle. From the outside it looked nearly perfect. “But does it work?” she asked pointedly.

Jenny shrugged. “Wind it and see?”

Their eyes met and there was a moment's trepidation. Did Vastra want to be right or wrong? She wasn't sure. As for Jenny, this was a big moment. Either she was going to prove herself, or she was going to prove Vastra's discrimination to be true, and earn herself more hellish training than ever. At last, Vastra carefully gripped the retrofitted key and turned it, cranking it around until it stopped. Then, she let it go and opened the ornate protective cover.

At first, there was nothing. Then, in jerky, sightly irregular motions, the dials began to turn, the calculations slowly being made, albeit incorrectly. Jenny sighed mostly in relief, though she had to wonder what Vastra would say and if it would be enough.

“It moves, but I would not say that it is operational,” Vastra said at last. She looked over at Jenny's face, which looked crushed, and felt regretful to bring that upon her, but the truth in her mind was evident.

Then, Jenny looked up from the device. “Do you have some sandpaper?”

Vastra shrugged. “No, but I do have a file. Will that do?”

“Yes, please, and hurry!” Jenny cried, excitedly.

Like a servant for her mistress, Vastra hurried away and came back with the diamond nail file she used to smooth her shiny obsidian-like nails. Jenny had the astrolabe open again, and showed her the inside.

“Do you see? These were nicked and bent a little by the shattered nagaron crystal. I have to smooth them out, or they won't turn nicely.” She set to work.

“Can you...just use gears from this pocket watch?”

Jenny bit her lip and shook her head. “One, maybe, but these, no. They're too thin. Look at this? What is this metal? But I think I can fix it.” It took her about an hour more, and while she meticulously labored, Vastra set out some left over bread and cheese.

Finally, Jenny sat upright, yawned, stretched, and pulled off the spectacles. She handed the device back to her mistress. This time, all the dials moved equally, and in correct intervals. Skeptical at first, she used the computer to calibrate the device and found that it was in working order. Could it guide a space ship? No, she decided, but it never could. It had been an antique, a nostalgic look at history, when it had been designed and assembled in the first place. A human vessel though, would have been divinely blessed to have this piece of technology in their possession. She took a long look at Jenny, who stared back at her with a little bit of hope, but otherwise composed and quiet.

“If you were a boy,” Vastra told her slowly, intensely, “you would be given a college education and a stipend. Are you sure you don't want that instead?”

Jenny's face shifted but didn't exactly change. Vastra sensed many thoughts in her mind but could not read them. “No, I know what I want. I want to work for you and train with you. Besides,” she added, “what more would I learn in college than I would from an intelligent lizard woman from the dawn of time?”

Vastra considered this. “As you wish. Thank you for the good work. Will you be taking tomorrow off?”

“No,” Jenny decided, “I'll meet you in the morning for training. I'll reserve my day off for when I actually need it.”

Vastra told her that this was just as well, and after a very light dinner, they said goodnight. Jenny, mentally exhausted, went straight to bed, while Vastra went to her study to admire the imperfect, but ingenious workmanship. _There's more to Miss Flint than she lets on_ , she thought to herself, studying the astrolabe critically, _let's see what more I can unlock from her mental coffers_.

 

Jenny returned from training late the next day, hands raw from wood chopping, and legs burning from her grueling morning run and numerous combat drills. Pulling her hair free of its pins, she moved to flop down on her bed when she noticed her junk box sitting there beside it. “I guess Vastra didn't want it cluttering the kitchen,” she muttered, and picked it up. And nearly dropped it.

Inside the box was not just the random doohickeys she had collected, but many other things as well. Lengths of wire in a rainbow colors were wound into spools. Numerous gears, not human in construction, but of Silurian design and craft, and in metals she could not identify also sat within, along with some metal casings and fittings. At last, at the bottom of the box, were tools. Not just normal tools, like a soft mallet and an actual set of tiny specialty screwdrivers, but sandpaper, tweezers, and a few different sizes of tongs something like what blacksmiths used, along with something that looked a little like a pistol and a sonic screwdriver. A note was affixed to it.

“ _It's a torch. Take care not to burn down the house or you'll run all the way to Arabia. I hope to see how your skills flourish. --V_.”

Excitement bursting in her chest, all thoughts of showering or naps evaporating, Jenny sat right down on the floor and began taking out all of her new treasures, wondering what else she would devise to impress the hard-to-please Madame Vastra.


End file.
